International Journal of Kurdish Studies

Abstract

Mele Telheyê Şerefkî, one of the scholars of Kurmanji Kurdish literature, has so far been the subject of only one symposium paper and mentioned in one sentence in an academic article with his life story, works and literary personality. Apart from these, only a few of his poems were in the possession of Diyarbakır madrasah teachers. Apart from this, there was no extensive information about him in the literature. Therefore, we identified this situation as a research problem and prepared our questions in order to introduce him together with his life story, his works and his literary personality and started the study field. During the research process, we saw Şerefki, met him face to face, asked him our questions and recorded his voice. We collected information several times through face-to-face interviews, one of the qualitative research techniques. Then we obtained his manuscript works and analysed them. As a result of the research, we found out that this scholar was educated in the 1960s in the madrasas of famous madrasas in the Serhat, Diyarbakır and Batman regions, and finally received his madrasah icazet from Mele Mûsa, the scholar of Diyarbakır Cimikan Madrasah. He started to write poems in Turkish, Arabic and Kurdish/Kurmanji from his early youth. Since he was the son-in-law of Şêx Xalidê Zengokî and his family benefited from his religious-literary works in Kurmanji, he was influenced by him in terms of religious literature. However, as he studied in various madrasas in the region of Serhat, Diyarbakır and Batman, he began to write Kurmanji poetry under the influence of Mele Şêxmus (Cegexwîn) and Mele Ebdurrehmanê Muşî (Durre). Şerefkî wrote a poetic mawlid, two divans, a poetic biography and a prose biography in Kurmanji, as well as several poems in Arabic and Turkish. Until now, none of these works have been published and researchers of Kurmanji literature have not been aware of him. Although the theme of his poems is usually national sentiments, there are also many poems that deal with the values of Islam.